Aptus

Aptus was developed to be a Mandelbrot set viewer and renderer. It is written in Python with a computation engine in C for speed.

There are two ways to use Aptus: a GUI explorer, and a command line renderer. The GUI lets you zoom in and out, and change the color palette to find an image you like. The command line renderer produces higher-quality images.

Aptus stores information about the image to display in a few ways. Small textual .aptus files store all the parameters needed to recreate an image, and can be saved from the GUI and fed to the command line renderer.

When saving an image as a .PNG file, Aptus also stores all its parameter information in a text block hidden in the image, so that the .PNG can be used directly as a parameter file.

Start Aptus with aptusgui.py, and start poking around. Left click or drag zooms you in, right click zooms you out. Type 'h' for help on other controls. Detailed descriptions of GUI behavior are below.

aptusgui.py also accepts applicable command-line switches so you can start it from a parameter file, or specify the size of the window, and so on.